Within days of one another in June, online petitions were created to change the name of Wheeler and Walton high schools due to their namesakes.
As East Cobb News first reported, the efforts were begun by students and others in the East Cobb school communities in the wake of the George Floyd killing that set off racial protests around the country.
George Walton was one of Georgia’s signers of the Declaration of Independence, served in Congress, and was a governor and chief justice of Georgia.
The Walton petition was started by a student there, Joseph Fisher, who said that Walton also was a slave owner.
“Every day that I am on campus I feel hate and oppression from the student body and the administration,” Fisher said. “I am constantly gaslighted and singled out for my experiences as a person of color, made fun of or the subject of jokes based on the color of my skin.”
But it has been at Wheeler that a more concerted effort to change the school name developed through the fall.
Wheeler was named after Joseph Wheeler, a Southern general in the Civil War who later was readmitted to the U.S. Army, served in Congress and is one of the few Confederate officers buried at Arlington National Cemetery.
Wheeler was for many years a nearly all-white school, but is now one of the most diverse in the Cobb school district. Georgia Department of Education figures from March showed that Wheeler had 811 black students out of a total enrollment of 2,159.
An online petition and a student group have noted the timing of the Cobb Board of Education’s decision in 1964 in naming a new high school in East Cobb after Wheeler, just as local schools were desegregated.
“I’m not sure if we’ll ever find out what was behind this,” 2015 Wheeler graduate Matthew Coffin told the current Cobb school board this month. “But I’m embarrassed by the name.”
A name change, he said, “will allow us to confront our painful past instead of ignoring it.”
The name change petition also has been signed by current school board member Charisse Davis, an African-American who represents the Walton and Wheeler clusters.
Another Wheeler graduate began an online petition to keep the Wheeler name in response.
Joseph Wheeler served the Confederacy for four years in his mid 20s,” wrote an unnamed signee to that petition. “He then spent the rest of his life serving his country on the right side of history. We have so few examples of leaders atoning for their past actions. Joseph Wheeler should be celebrated, particularly in this time of partisan politics.”
There doesn’t figure to be any action soon on any name change. In November the school board’s Republican majority reversed a vote to create a special committee to examine name change issues, prompting Davis and Jaha Howard, a fellow black Democratic member, to accuse their colleagues of “systemic racism.”
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